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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

It probably shouldn't be that big of a surprise. Police officers are almost entirely decent people that shouldn't feel the need to change their behavior just because they're being recorded.

Regular citizens would already be on their best behavior around cops, the camera doesn't change much.

I think people get a skewed perception of the police force from a relatively small number of highly publicized incidents.

Counter option: The DC cops are so brazen that they don't even care if they're being caught on film. This doesn't seem likely, since it would be such an easy payday for some hungry defense lawyer.

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This explains too much, since there have been other depts that did see a likely effect (like Rialto). I found this part more compelling:

> Finally, cameras may have had less impact in Washington, D.C., because the police department there has already had to confront excessive-force problems. After a devastating 1998 Washington Post series revealed that the city’s police department had shot and killed more people per resident in the 1990s than any other police force in a large American city, the Department of Justice entered into a memorandum of agreement with D.C. to reform its policing.

I do think people overstate the extent to which police violence in the US is a problem of evil cops committing wanton abuse as opposed to deeper systemic issues, but I think it's possible that bodycams end up being a useful piece of that puzzle.

It's blindingly obvious (to me) that the cops are just disabling the cameras before doing controversial things. I find it extremely surprising that nobody else seems to believe this theory.

As another commented pointed out downthread, you can hear them on accidentally-recorded video saying things like "We're still red here! Be careful!" when planting evidence/stealing stuff/whatever.

Disclaimer: I think both street protesters/identity politics activists and the police are basically run by assholes.

It'd be trivial to find evidence of that in the data. They said that the number of use of force incidents was the same in the camera and non-camera groups. If the cops were disabling their cameras in anticipation of these events, these events would not show up in their camera recordings.

It's not trivial to find that in the data. The cops are not required to keep the camera on all the time, or at least there is no consequence not doing so. They got the number from "administrative data", basically just police reports and civilian complaints, etc. Nothing related to the camera data at all.

Or it could also mean that, camera or not, the cop could get away with anything as if the camera wasn't present.

There are many other possible interpretations of the data, besides the one you provide above.

E.g. the cops can do lots of shady stuff that isn't a "use of force incident."

Yes, but that'd show up in the data. If there were complaints against them, and those happened to coincide with the cameras being off, that's a very easy thing to detect in the data.

As far as I can tell, there is no analysis of the video data mentioned in this article. They're only comparing numbers of complaints with and without cameras.

I personally know of two cops that blatantly admit that they do this as well. Now, I'm just a single-data point, but I wonder if there is any data as to how many times videos are "redacted" or "lost".

> I think people get a skewed perception of the police force from a relatively small number of highly publicized incidents.

It's not just the incidents themselves, but the fact that the entire force seems to be quite willing to shield the worst offenders.

Sure, Office Steve probably won't knock me around because of my skin color, but how many times has he looked away while Officer John did?

Surprised to see this downvoted - it was my initial thought as well. If most cops are decent and doing what they think is right, then that wouldn't change just because they're wearing bodycams.

That said, I still think bodycams are a great idea. I hadn't heard justification of them based on improving some aggregate statistics before. Instead, I've always thought they were good for those particularly difficult "he said / she said" cases that capture public attention.

I think maybe it was downvoted because it misses the point, just as the article misses the point. Behavior change would be nice but the real benefit here is accountability. So what if there were 1.6% (made up number) rate of reported bad behaviors, and now the rate is still 1.6% -- the point is that in those 1.6% of cases, there is now the best kind of evidence to ensure that the facts are represented accurately when these cases are adjudicated. That accurate portrayal of facts will actually protect both cops and citizens.

Yes, this is the real benefit. It's no longer the police's word against the defendant, which nearly always goes the way of the police in a court of law.

Accountability is key.

That's not necessarily true. I've seen juries dismiss charges that came down to word vs word.

>Instead, I've always thought they were good for those particularly difficult "he said / she said" cases that capture public attention.

I agree, but at what price point would you say it's worth it?

In principle I want bodycams, but with this new study it's making me wonder if pragmatically it's really worth spending millions of dollars each year just for a handful of difficult 'he said / she said' cases to be better resolved.

Probably it still is given that these small handful of cases get the biggest media attention / public backlash that hurts the image of the police. In that sense bodycams can almost be thought of as a public relations expense.

Only millions? No problem at all.

Let's revise that estimate, though.

765,000 sworn state-level personnel in 2008. We'll round up to a million.

At $1000 each for hardened, certified cameras, that's a billion dollars. But we should expect them to last about three years, so $333M each year.

Storage costs are cheap, but secure handling of storage is not. Let's say one full-time $100K employee per hundred camera-wearing officers. That's a billion dollars per year.

So I'll go with a cost estimate of 1.3 - 1.5 billion per year for cameras for all police officers.

Is that worth it? I think so.

$1000 is way too high. I bought a helmet cam in 2009 that was designed for military applications (fairly robust, easy to change AA batteries) and it cost about $300-400 back then. Looking for fairly robust cameras I can see that the action camera in Olympus Tough lineup is currently selling for $350. I've seen other cameras in this product line take a good beating and come out fine.

Obviously there would be additional costs (memory cards, readers, batteries, chargers, harness, etc) but I don't see why it would come to more than $500-600 per person at most.

About $450 a pop with dock. Storage is expensive though. Cameras on all times and retention for 90 days is what this particular department had.

http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2017-09-24/police-wei...

Why is the lifetime so short? Are the batteries non-replaceable? I'd definitely be looking into replacing worn out batteries on $1000 devices.

Oh, it will probably go down over time, but remember that police departments aren't going to go out and buy $399 Go-Pros.

No, they'll be buying tactical harnesses and military-tough specially cased relabeled $299 Go-Pros for $999 for each complete system, from a certified minority-owned business in partnership with Halliburton.

The way you chained that together was almost musical.

And yet many people don’t on their phones that cost close to this.

Back in the days when you could replace the batteries on most phones they would be badly obsolete and unsupported in 3 years. Even today it's a bit iffy on spending the $50 to replace a battery in a 3 year old Android phone.

A camera won't become obsolete nearly as fast. Assuming the cops shoot in HD today (it would be really dumb if they didn't) then that will still be HD tomorrow. Maybe not 4k, but honestly I don't think 4k brings a lot to the table at this time in this application.

I disagree, human vision is pretty amazing with a huge field of view and while the amount of detail is only really high at the center of vision to match what an officer can make out you'd pretty much need a lot of detail everywhere. I don't think we'll see affordable 4k body cameras for a while but there's definitely benefits to recording in 4k.

Those he said/she said events can turn into multi-million dollar lawsuits really quickly. It only takes a couple of incidents for the cameras to pay for themselves.

The data storage issue is definitely a concern, but I think it is one that can be effectively managed.

wait but wouldn't the states have to pay for those lawsuits if the video evidence showed the cop doing the thing? Ohh I guess the narrative is that the police is most often wrongfully accused of wrongdoing, costing the state millions, which the cameras could help to clear up. Fnord.

An economic solution lies in wait. What is the impact of settlements in "he said / she said" cases resolved in the defendant's favor? Is it "millions of dollars each year"?

I don't know if that works... I mean, even if it's millions of $ each year that PD have to settle/pay, why does it hurt them? Aren't they simply going to pass that cost back to the taxpayers?

Police departments have budgets, not blank checks. If the police come to the local government saying they need an extra umpty-million this year because they keep getting sued for brutality, questions are going to be asked.

Certainly, but at the end of the day, they'll say: "well if we don't get $x then we will have to cut the force. If we don't pay our officers, they are just going to leave." What do you do then? You can fire people you hold accountable, but that isn't going to fix your budget situation: if you don't fund the PD, the services are going to be cut, and taxpayers are going to be impacted.

>Police officers are almost entirely decent people . . .

This statement requires justification.

>Research suggests that family violence is two to four times higher in the law-enforcement community than in the general population.

>As the National Center for Women and Policing noted in a heavily footnoted information sheet, "Two studies have found that at least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10 percent of families in the general population. A third study of older and more experienced officers found a rate of 24 percent, indicating that domestic violence is two to four times more common among police families than American families in general." Cops "typically handle cases of police family violence informally, often without an official report, investigation, or even check of the victim's safety," the summary continues. "This 'informal' method is often in direct contradiction to legislative mandates and departmental policies regarding the appropriate response to domestic violence crimes." Finally, "even officers who are found guilty of domestic violence are unlikely to be fired, arrested, or referred for prosecution."

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-...

Family violence is also more common in first responders/EMTs and soldiers.

Take a wild guess on what those have in common with police officers.

People that are constantly exposed to highly stressful situations tend to develop psychological problems.

He said:

>Police officers are almost entirely decent people . . .

Between 20% and 40% abuse their families. Does an entirely decent person abuse his family?

I'm not aware of a higher family abuse rate among EMTs, and a quick Google search produced nothing, so I'd appreciate any sources. Your reasoning makes sense, but I can just as easily say that violent people are more inclined to be police officers and soldiers - for obvious reasons. I'd guess it's some of both (some high stress and the attraction of the occupation to violent people).

The problem is that the Atlantic publishes very selective data.

Yes police officers have higher rates than the average, but you know who has higher than even those wife beating cops? Men that work in "demeaning jobs" or professions that are attributed traditionally to women like clerks, secretaries, teacher/classroom aides and maids/helpers.

The vast majority of those articles boil down to a handful of studies the one linked below is probably the most commonly referenced.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2002....

And yes most police officers are decent and professional people, but there isn't such thing as being universally decent and any person is capable of the utmost indecency.

And you know what they say about so many intimate partner abuse cases? he/she was the nicest person in the world I would never think they would be capable of it....

People that abuse their partner more often than not do it as a release mechanism rather than their normal pattern of behaviour.

> the Atlantic publishes very selective data

What is that based on?

Because based on every study while police officers, soldiers and other people that are put in stressful and life threatening situations do exhibit higher rates of abuse men that work at jobs that hurt their ego are even more prominently represented and unlike police officers, soldiers and emergency services personnel they don't have a PTSD just a small dick problem.

Um, this study isn't controlling for socioeconomic status?

It sort of barely controls for age, which finds lower violence when the officers are older.

But it's not very convincing. Anecdotally it seems like there is a domestic violence problem in the population, but you can't compare it to the general population. You need to control for education, background, and socioeconomic status.

You don’t actually need a control to make claims about what fraction of police officers are “decent people”. Even if, hypothetically, decency were determined completely by external factors that happen to correlate with being a police officer, that wouldn’t change the fact that any police officer you meet is likely to be less (or more) decent than some baseline of people in general.

Though, of course, the source itself may be making stronger claims…

Counter counter option: Not all districts are created equally. We know from history that some districts have become so corrupt that the feds had to step in and replace entire police forces.

I suspect police abuse is not as wide-spread as we've been led to believe by social justice marketing, but I'm open to evidence to the contrary. Let's put our engineers to work and get the costs of these camera systems way down, and then let's put them on every cop in the nation. It's not just the BLM folks talking about this, the MRAs also have claims about things like men who are physically abused by women, cop shows up, arrests the man anyways, and those sorts of stories. One way or the other we can put a number of social justice issues to rest.

> social justice marketing ... not just the BLM folks ...

It doesn't sound like you are "open to evidence to the contrary". Those words seem to dismiss such evidence.

Skepticism is merited after a certain volume of debunked claims.

Partisans always 'debunk' every claim made that disagrees with them. It's not a meaningful signal.

1. As a point of clarification, I'm not partisan, nor are the sources I had in mind.

2. There's a distinction between "debunked" and "claimed to be debunked"; you're conflating my meaning (the former) with the latter. If you did mean the former, then you're questioning all empiricism and objectivity, in which case we have no basis for discussion or reason and we may as well stop now.

> Police officers are almost entirely decent people

should perhaps be

> Police officers are almost entirely almost decent people

The fact that the "few" (so we're told) bad apples aren't rooted out by their fellow honest, law-abiding officers suggests they're not as squeaky clean as some might think.

I can't claim to be more than an almost decent person myself. If you require the police to be angels, well, those are in short supply down here...

Note well: I am not saying that we should lower the standard of behavior that we expect police to abide by. I am merely saying that, in the real world, almost decent is probably the best we can actually find.

Yet in the UK unarmed officers will happily trap a man with a knife behind a shopping cart until he gets tired.

In the US people get shot for carrying a tiny razor blade...

You can train people to deescalate rather than shooting; to use minimal force; to remain calm while exercising force; to ask someone if they doing fine, while forcefully holding them to the ground. Or calmly explain to a hysterical individual being held down that things are going to be okay.

It takes training though.

It doesn't require an angel to turn in a coworker who executes a black man in cold blood.

Or they don't know. I had a coworker who was recently arrested for child porn. Despite knowing and working with him for years there was no indication that he wasn't "squeaky clean".

But we're talking about incidents that are public. When Eric Garner was choked to death by police, I don't recall hearing a lot of cops call for those detectives to be fired. Hell, when the Mayor of NYC said something about it, at the next event, cops turned their backs on him.

These are not "decent people".

> Hell, when the Mayor of NYC said something about it, at the next event, cops turned their backs on him.

> These are not "decent people".

I really don't think it's that clear cut. The cops who turned their backs aren't all, necessarily, bad people. The insularity of police culture generates significant peer pressure for cops to cover each other's backs and to protect their mutual perceived safety and self interest.

They respond to perceived attacks on interests in a similar way to what many subcultures do when they feel their interests are being encroached upon; they protest and grow more insular in solidarity.

This tends to lead to a bubble and allows otherwise decent people to, inadvertently or otherwise, overlook the shortcomings of "a few bad apples", in the interest of protecting people who they think have their best interests at heart.

I'm not saying this is good, it's just important to remember that cops are humans and behave like humans. Training is supposed to reduce the incidence of human misbehavior but I think that even just the fact that police wear uniforms tends to make them take the side of the "team" that they're representing.

An enormous amount of evil that has occurred in this world has involved peer pressure. And all evil has extenuating circumstances. I understand that to prevent evil we should understand the reasoning behind why people do bad things. But this doesn't make the people or acts less evil.

Peer pressure or not, protesting accountability for your group after a member committed manslaughter is a bad act.

>Peer pressure or not, protesting accountability for your group after a member committed manslaughter is a bad act.

I believe they were protesting the generalizations he insinuated about the entire police department. I found it distasteful, but the good cops had a reason to be pissed.

I don't know about everyone else, but until they start to step up and turn in the bad apples, I will personally continue to make generalizations. These people are police officers, it's their job to uphold the law.

Giving the benefit of the doubt, good cops could have turned in serious offenders, but we would never know about it because we only get our information from the news. I assume the PD would keep it internal.

Granted, that is an optimistic view.

I suppose it wasn't entirely clear as I didn't state it explicitly, but my point really was that a few bad apples spoils the bunch.

If you turn your back on a mayor asking for police accountability, and you side with those who wantonly murder innocent people, then you are a bad person. They are people, but they're also given quite a lot of power. I don't think it is a bad thing that they be held to a higher standard of accountability for it. That, and I also don't think that "don't take the side of those who murder innocent people" is a high standard.

> The insularity of police culture generates significant peer pressure for cops to cover each other's backs and to protect their mutual perceived safety and self interest.

If you are a cop and succumb to peer pressure to protect bad cops from the consequences of their actions, then I submit that you are also a bad cop.

We must hold the police to a higher standard than "they're just human; they can't help behaving this way".

History is full of murderous monsters who were nothing but kind to their families and neighbors. I recognize that these cops are not mustache-twirling villains but humans subject to various emotional pressures, but if they're enabling and protecting murderers then they are not good cops.

You should sprinkle some more "I think" and "I believe" and "I'm under the impression" when stating your opinions, because none of what you say is anything more than speculation and just-so stories.

When writing an opinion piece, at least in formal writing which has higher standards, writers are trained not to do that. At least in the writing classes I took ages ago.

Here's why:

https://preciseedit.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/in-my-opinion-i...

I agree, and of course there's an implied statement of opinion in screeds like GP's, but they set up such a tenuous chain of causality that I just couldn't help myself.

I don't know, if you ask me when in the field of public policy, this approach is a bad idea. When I encounter someone making proposals who is stating opinion as fact, I assume the person doesn't know the difference so I discount their opinion fairly strongly, because a lot if not most people in my experience genuinely don't know the difference.

Yes, journalism is a bit different, but typically opinion pieces either have OPINION written at the top of the article on the web, or appear in the opinion section of the paper. I generally stay away from opinion pieces because they deliberately try to convince me to a particular side of an argument, which usually excludes alternative information. I'd rather come up with my own conclusions.

I led the comment with "I really don't think it's that clear cut" - intending to indicate I was about to express an opinion.

I have a friend in the NYPD, who did not turn his back on the mayor in that incident.

This problem needs to be solved from the top down. Police need to be constantly reminded that their job is more than just being enforcers.

How wouldn't they know? They go 99% of the time in groups of 2 or more. (And part of the reason for this is precisely to avoid that 1 of them goes rogue when working alone).

Your co-worker didn't wank off to child porn at work with his workmates, I reckon. You cannot compare both situations.

People get arrested for CP all the time, even when they are completely innocent. Just being arrested doesn't mean anything. If they are sentenced, and serve time, that's something different.

You can get popped for CP just by downloading what you think isn't CP from a torrent client.

IMO you should only get arrested for CP if you are paying to access it, or producing it. As it is now, it's just a tool for the police to criminalize whoever they feel like.

>As it is now, it's just a tool for the police to criminalize whoever they feel like.

There is actually something to this. It's the latest moral justification for around-the-law searches. Last few decades it was drugs. Police can pretty much search anyone if they reasonably believe they have drugs. This can get stretched into anything, such has having a few hundred bucks in cash. This means police can stop and search just about any car.

Next it was terrorism, so police can warranty search anyone or anything at airports, bus stations, train terminals, border crossings, just about anything. These powers aren't limited to terrorist activities either, but terrorism was the justification.

Now, computers yield more information that vehicles, so police need a way to extend their powers to search anyone's computer. Enter child porn.

As a general rule, anytime the government prohibits or extends their power "for the children," it's a huge red flag. Child porn fits into this category. It's hard to object to expansion of power to battle this too. I mean think of the children (ignoring their dystopian future).

The difference here is that the bad cops are bat at being police. The criticism is not about something they do off the clock. Police should be able to ...police themselves.

> I think people get a skewed perception of the police force from a relatively small number of highly publicized incidents.

Or perhaps people arrive at their perceptions based on personal experience? Certainly my own experience with police has shaped my views far more than anything I've seen in the news.

> > I think people get a skewed perception of the police force from a relatively small number of highly publicized incidents.

> Or perhaps people arrive at their perceptions based on personal experience?

Probably also a factor, but that's also not representative and subject to perceptual biases.

>but that's also not representative

One occurrence possibly. When it happens multiple times, I'm not inclined to attribute it to perceptual biases.

I can't agree with the characterization of them being "almost entirely decent people" when they clam up and defend the objectively bad among them. Decent people don't do that.

In fact there were some famous studies that disproved that assertion when the "decent people" are part of a larger organization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

Seems like either a) decent people in fact do that, or b) there just aren't many decent people out there, based on the evidence of the behavior of insiders in pretty much ever organization or industry that's ever had a highly-placed sexual assaulter, fraudster, or similar.

I assumed the point of body cameras was simply for physical evidence after an incident, that cops might "behave" better due to some psychological effect doesn't strike me as important.

Agreed. I thought that any "nudge" factor was secondary to getting reliable reporting at the scene rather than relying upon corruptible testimony by officers after-the-fact. All the problems stated elsewhere in this thread around discretion in deactivating cameras still exist and need to be addressed.

>I think people get a skewed perception of the police force from a relatively small number of highly publicized incidents.

...who receive lots of back up from other police officers, superiors and the law.

> I think people get a skewed perception of the police force from a relatively small number of highly publicized incidents.

What is this statement based on? Can you provide any data? What about people - whole communities in many places, over generations - who claim to be persecuted continuously by police. Are those people making it up? The people protesting in St Louis - what are they spending all that time and energy on if there is no problem?

This issue has been discussed heavily; I think more 'IMHOs' don't add to what we know about it.

Well, if Ferguson is any example, communities will absolutely lie about the police. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Michael_Brown#Ev... This isn't to say police are completely innocent; just that the "entire communities..." defense isn't a very good one.

If what you say about Brown is true (Wikipedia is not a reliable source on politically controversial issues), it's not evidence. That's just one incident in among claims by millions of people that have been going on for generations.

> Wikipedia is not a reliable source on politically controversial issues

I can't imagine it's less reliable than, say, the field of sociology. At any rate, the claims in the wikipedia article are well-sourced, so if they are false, it should be trivial to demonstrate as much.

> it's not evidence. That's just one incident in among claims by millions of people that have been going on for generations.

What you describe is evidence. It isn't proof. But your broader point stands--we need more data about this to know how prevalent it is. My only point is that it's not unprecedented for communities to lie--specifically your refutation ("it's been going on for generations") supports my pet theory, which is that a lot of historical oppression by police has turned many black communities against police, driving uncharitable interpretations of police behavior at best and outright slander (as in the Ferguson case) at worst. Note that these communities can be lying and not necessarily be bad people--slander is morally wrong, but it's also an understandable (though unjust, misguided, etc) response to oppression. Compassion and honesty aren't mutually exclusive, as we are often tempted to believe.

> I think people get a skewed perception of the police force from a relatively small number of highly publicized incidents.

I assume you are white which is why you made that statement, I think a black person would have a different opinion.

What do cops care about a defense lawyer's "easy payday?"

They care when the chief has to explain to the city council why they need an extra $2 million in the budget this year. Shit rolls downhill.

That money isn't paid out of the budget, they have insurance for it.

Insurers are not charities. They price based on a risk model.

A police department with frequent liability payouts can expect their premiums to be priced according to the risk they represent (assuming they are even able to find an insurer still willing to underwrite them).

Do those risk adjustments actually occur in real life? Is it even specifically "police insurance," or is it under the umbrella of the insurance for the jurisdiction (city, county, etc.) where those risk adjustments can get buried within larger coverage patterns?

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